There is a line in the conversation where I thought: half a year ago I would not have believed this. One of the makers of Claude Code says he now does probably half of his programming on his phone. Not reviewing, not approving. Starting and steering.
He has so many agents running at once that he might as well begin them from his phone. He starts something on his computer, takes it over from his phone with a remote control, and walks off. Get coffee, wander around, check on the agents in the meantime, and maybe start another one.
The couch story
The best detail comes from a colleague. She saw the maker’s laptop sitting at the office for days. Plugged in, screen locked, no one behind it. At first she thought he had forgotten it. But it kept happening, and meanwhile she watched him land pull requests. When she asked, the answer was simple: yeah, I am coding from my couch. That was the week the remote control got really good.
What I like about it is that no one planned this. It became possible, so it happened. And suddenly the desk is no longer where the work lives, but at most where it sometimes begins.
What the workspace looks like
The shape underneath has changed too. He used to keep six terminal tabs open with six copies of the same codebase, jumping between them. Now it is one tab, with a new agent view that keeps all the work readable, and a desktop app that handles copying those codebases itself. No more fiddling with checkouts.
And sometimes it gets looser still. He is in a conversation with someone, an idea comes up, and he starts an agent on the spot. Talks to it with voice, lets it build, and does not even have to go back to his computer.
The caveat
This sounds like a story about a handy gadget, and in part it is. But there is a more serious side I do not want to leave out. When work is no longer tied to a place or a screen, it also happens everywhere. The desk used to enforce a line: you work here, not there. That line is now yours to draw, or not to draw.
For me that is the real lesson. It is wonderful that I can start an agent on the move and the work carries on while I do something else. But the freedom to always be able to work is also the temptation to always work. The technology gives me the room. What I do with it stays up to me.
Part 5 of a series on how the makers of Claude Code work with it themselves. Earlier: the bug was already fixed before I started and I dropped Plan mode.